Crime in San Francisco hit record lows as the city hopefully moves toward closing the chapter on “reform” prosecutors once and for all.
In January, crime in San Francisco hit a 23-year low, with violent and property crime dropping at a far more dramatic rate than the average of similarly sized cities. Over the first three months of 2025, property crime was down 45%, car thefts were down 41%, larceny was down 29%, and robberies were down 20%. San Francisco’s monthly jail population has returned to pre-2020 levels, meaning the city is back to putting criminals in jail, capping a rise that started in mid-2023.
This is happening in large part because San Francisco’s district attorney is a real prosecutor. Brooke Jenkins took over the office after being appointed in mid-2022 and was elected to a full term this past November. She worked in the prosecutor’s office from 2014 until 2021, when she resigned to participate in the recall campaign against then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Jenkins overcame the struggles she faced in mid-2023 and erased doubts (including from yours truly) about her ability to do the job, especially now that the city has provided additional support.
The key behind San Francisco’s turnaround on crime under Jenkins is that she believes crime is bad and that criminals should go to jail. This should be the basic worldview of every district attorney. However, it wasn’t under Boudin. After taking office in 2020 (when San Francisco’s drop in the jail population began), Boudin centered the city’s justice system on making sure criminals served as little jail time as possible. He was more concerned with criminals and fighting “mass incarceration” than securing justice for crime victims.
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Boudin was a defense attorney who sought the position so he could undermine it. His worldview was informed by his own life experience, in which his terrorist parents were jailed for years after a robbery they took part in led to their co-conspirators murdering three people. Under Boudin, San Francisco’s prison bars became revolving doors, all because he had to walk through a metal detector as a child to hug his parents while they served their sentences.
However, that is no longer the case. San Francisco recalled Boudin and confirmed that it wanted Jenkins as his replacement. Now, the city is reaping the benefits. San Francisco’s experience proves that rosy “reform” ideology has no place in criminal prosecutions and that some people simply deserve to be put in jail to keep law-abiding residents safe. San Francisco is back on the right track in terms of crime, and it can stay that way as long as residents remember the lessons of recent years.